New York Botanical Garden
http://www.nybg.org/
The Garden is open year-round, Tuesday to Sunday
Closed Mondays
Open on Monday federal holidays
Closed Thanksgiving and Christmas
April to October: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
November to March: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Romantic, elegant magnolias mesmerize with their arresting color and shape. April 2005.
Enid A. Haupt Conservatory: misty rain forests, dramatic deserts, and seasonal spectacles.
Botanical Garden Will Unveil Eight New Greenhouses
BY GARY SHAPIRO - Staff Reporter of the Sun
May 10, 2005
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/13565
"State of the art" is how the New York Botanical Garden's vice president for capital projects and architect, Michael Adlerstein, described the Nolen Greenhouses for Living Collections, which are opening Saturday after 15 months of construction.
Spanning almost an acre in the southeast corner of the NYBG in the Bronx, the two blocks of interconnected glasshouses (shaped somewhat like an "H") contain eight growing zones that will enable the NYBG to develop its living collections, propagate plants for exhibition, and grow plants for study, research, and conservation.
The curator of glasshouse collections, Darrin Duling, said, "Visually, it's stunning." He said its cutting-edge technology - including computer-automated features of shade, humidification, ventilation, and heat retention - would increase efficiency.
"Old-fashioned greenhouses were hinged at the top and the vents opened at the side," Mr. Duling said. "These glasshouses have vents hinged at the side,, and basically the whole roof opens up at the center, and you're looking at the sky. Every house is like that." The doors have electric eyes: "If you're carrying large specimens or carts full of plants, the electric eye beam is broken and the door opens up, making it a lot more efficient in transporting materials," Mr. Duling said. The glasshouses, made of special "low-iron glass," are equipped with retractable shade curtains pulled by motors to keep the plants cool when needed.
The old propagation range, which the Nolen Greenhouses replace, was not open to the public. Although seven of the eight Nolen Greenhouses will normally be closed to the public, this coming weekend offers a rare opportunity to step inside. "It is the one time where we allow people to see the entire greenhouse. It will be the first time people have a behind-the-scenes look at our core collections and how we grow them," Mr. Duling said.
One area, called the Bourke-Sullivan Display House, will be open to the public, offering themed exhibits. The first display, called "Primrose Palette," featuring classic Victorian glasshouse plants, is designed to resemble a private home's greenhouse, Mr. Duling said. "We're cultivating a lot of unusual primroses that you don't see in this country. Lots of color and texture."
Moth Orchids in the Conservatory
March 12, 2006
A Place to Work on Darwin's 'Abominable Mystery'
By GLENN COLLINS
A west view of the Pfizer Plant Research Laboratory, opening soon at the New York Botanical Garden.
They will not be cloning sheep, engineering mutants or genetically modifying corn in the new biological research laboratory. And its ZIP code isn't in Berkeley, Cambridge or even Manhattan.
It's 10458, in the Bronx. The new $23 million facility — the first laboratory to be built at the New York Botanical Garden in 50 years — is expected to take genetic research at the nation's botanical gardens to a new level. Scholars at the new laboratory will be doing research into the ecology, habitat and biology of plants at a time when many species are increasingly endangered.
The laboratory, as well as its research program, "is a bold initiative, a departure for American botanical gardens," said Michael J. Donoghue, a Yale University professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, who is the director of Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History.
Dr. Donoghue said the laboratory's research would add to scientific knowledge about conservation, biodiversity, climate change and the interaction of plants and humans. Thanks to its focus on plant genomics, the study of how genes function in plant development, the laboratory will enable the botanical garden "to carve out a very interesting world niche," he said.
Later this month, the new laboratory will begin to be inhabited by scientists, and after its completion, the official opening on May 16 is expected to be attended not only by the Nobel laureate James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, but also by Edward O. Wilson, the biologist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and Oliver W. Sacks, the author and neurologist.
Scientists will be closely monitoring the laboratory's future work on many urgent questions.
Ultimately, said Dennis Stevenson, the garden's vice president for botanical science, some of its long-term research could provide answers to "what Darwin called the abominable mystery — when, where and why flowering plants emerged."
That was when plants began utilizing insects for pollination, which was more efficient than wind or water, he said, adding that as far as scientists know, flowering plants appeared 100 million years ago — "out of nowhere," he said. The completion of the 28,000-square-foot, two-floor facility will triple the garden's research capacity and ensure training of the next generation of plant scientists, said Gregory Long, president of the mile-long, 250-acre garden, a national historic landmark.
Built with money from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, New York State and New York City, it is to be called the Pfizer Plant Research Laboratory, after its largest private donor. The construction is part of a 15-year, $520 million program of development and restoration at the garden, which is 115 years old and draws 600,000 visitors a year.
Some of the laboratory's research will further the discipline of molecular systematics — the study of DNA as evidence that can reveal the evolutionary history and relationships of plant species. Other scientists will be studying plant genomics, addressing the way in which plant genes function in larger sets of genomes.
The research will also address less theoretical concerns: Michael Balick, a staff scientist, will use the new laboratory to study medicinal plant use in Dominican immigrant communities in New York City. And Dr. Stevenson will be trying to identify the genetic mechanism by which neurotoxins are produced in some plants, work that may be related to nerve disease in humans.
The new laboratory will be an ornament of the science campus in the non-public northwest quadrant of the garden. A staff of 200 trains 42 doctoral students at a time from all over the world, and since the 1890's, the garden's scientists have mounted about 2,000 exploratory missions across the planet to collect plants in the wild.
The new building, of tawny precast concrete, glass, painted steel and copper, was designed by Polshek Partnership Architects. It has views of twin spring-fed, wooded lakes populated with mature red oaks and glacially shaped outcrops of Fordham gneiss.
Its second-floor ornament, and largest laboratory, will have 24 research stations, some of them robotic. There, investigating plant genomics, scientists will sequence plant genes — that is, analyze the unique genetic code in a sample and break down each gene into its building-block chemicals. The process once took several days for each gene, but new technology will permit the analysis of 600 genes per day.
In the plant chemistry laboratory, chemical compounds from plants will be extracted to create a library of the chemistry of the world's plants, and permit scientists to trace plants' evolutionary history.
And a 768-square-foot DNA storage room with 20 freezers will store millions of specimens, including rare, endangered or extinct species. To protect them during winter power outages, there is a backup 300-kilowatt electric generator.
The institution's research will be more diverse than research in universities and pharmaceutical companies. To Dr. Donoghue at Yale, many commercial research laboratories "are interested in economically important plants like rice and corn, but the botanical garden is a pure research institution."
The botanical garden's president, Mr. Long, added, "And we don't do genetic engineering."
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
Thanks for the reminder.
Orchid exhibit going on now.
http://www.nybg.org/whats_on_now/whatsonnow.php
Spring at the NYBG:
Cherry tree and daffodils
Queen of Sheba
Lacebark Pine, from China
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